Electronic Aggression Among Emerging Adults: Motivations and Contextual Factors.

The present study used quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate contextual factors and motivations associated with emerging adults' electronic aggression victimization and perpetration with friends and dating partners. Participants ( = 226) reported online about electronic aggression occurrence and motivations, family risk, support from friends, and emotion regulation. Males reported more victimization than perpetration overall, whereas females reported more victimization than perpetration only with friends.

Community Violence Exposure and Adolescents' School Engagement and Academic Achievement Over Time.

Objective: This study examined the relationships between community violence exposure and two related, but meaningfully distinct, academic outcomes: school engagement and academic achievement (GPA). Psychological symptoms were investigated as mediators of these relationships.

Method: One hundred eighteen youth reported on community violence exposure and school engagement twice during adolescence, and both parents and adolescents reported on psychological symptoms.

The embodiment of emotion: language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity.

Complex social emotions involve both abstract cognitions and bodily sensations, and individuals may differ on their relative reliance on these. We hypothesized that individuals' descriptions of their feelings during a semi-structured emotion induction interview would reveal two distinct psychological styles-a more abstract, cognitive style and a more body-based, affective style-and that these would be associated with somatosensory neural activity. We examined 28 participants' open-ended verbal responses to admiration- and compassion-provoking narratives in an interview and BOLD activity to the same narratives during subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning.

Subgenual anterior cingulate responses to peer rejection: a marker of adolescents' risk for depression.

Extensive developmental research has linked peer rejection during adolescence with a host of psychopathological outcomes, including depression. Moreover, recent neuroimaging research has suggested that increased activity in the subgenual region of the anterior cingulate cortex (subACC), which has been consistently linked with depression, is related to heightened sensitivity to peer rejection among adolescents. The goal of the current study was to directly test the hypothesis that adolescents' subACC responses are predictive of their risk for future depression, by examining the relationship between subACC activity during peer rejection and increases in depressive symptoms during the following year.

Neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescents and adults: when social perspective-taking informs self-perception.

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14 years) and adulthood (N = 12, ages 23-30 years). During direct self-reflection, adolescents demonstrated greater activity than adults in networks relevant to self-perception (medial prefrontal and parietal cortices) and social-cognition (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporal-parietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus), suggesting adolescent self-construals may rely more heavily on others' perspectives about the self.

Neural correlates of social exclusion during adolescence: understanding the distress of peer rejection.

Developmental research has demonstrated the harmful effects of peer rejection during adolescence; however, the neural mechanisms responsible for this salience remain unexplored. In this study, 23 adolescents were excluded during a ball-tossing game in which they believed they were playing with two other adolescents during an fMRI scan; in reality, participants played with a preset computer program. Afterwards, participants reported their exclusion-related distress and rejection sensitivity, and parents reported participants' interpersonal competence.